Hello everyone!
As I mentioned in last week's book post, I have a few stragglers left from my Christmas reading binge that should have honestly been done in December, but since there's only four Thursdays you have at your disposal then, it's really impossible to fit EVERYTHING in there.
Tonight's topic is one of them.
It probably doesn't seem too Christmas-y though since there really isn't much mention of the holiday, but what it IS is definitely cold and wintry and filled with ice and snow, which is pretty accurate for this time, I suppose.
Or mostly accurate. We all know how the weather is at the moment.
Anyway, if you're lucky you have some snow, but if not then you just have frost overnight and some weird warm temperatures over day. The times when we got to frolic in the fluff are long, long gone, and I don't think they're ever coming back.
But before I get too melancholy about it, let's take a look at Where Winter Finds You, shall we?
But I digress.
Where Winter Finds You is a novella in the bigger Brotherhood world and it's about Trez.
If you remember Trez, he's one of the two Shadows (along with his twin, iAm) who came onto the scene with Rhev way back when and they got their own book, The Shadows, quite a bit ago. In that book, Trez found the love of his life in Selena, but unfortunately she was terminally ill with a disease no one could cure, and ended up passing away. It remains one of my favourite books because of the rather daring concept behind it.
Then comes Where Winter Finds You, in which Trez reconnects with this vampire he met just a little while ago in one of the recent books, Theresa.
And she just so happens to be a reincarnation of Selena, right down to the way she looks.
Theresa is an orphan who was adopted into a sweet, middle class working family where she had pretty much anything she'd ever want until she learned she was adopted. At that moment, she didn't exactly react the best way, running off from the family who loved her, and whose only crime was that they didn't really want her to know she wasn't their blood-daughter. She hasn't had any communication with them since, and doesn't think she needs anyone to make it in this world, actually.
Now don't get me wrong. The fact that Tess wasn't told about her adoption and found out completely randomly is definitely bad - and I certainly don't condone her just running into the blue. But the thing is, her family didn't exactly react the best, either, their focus on the matriarch, who's had a weak heart pretty much all her life, instead of the other person who was in the room, hurting.
So naturally when Tess does get a sliver of her past life back when she turns on her old phone, she gets all these messages from her brother, including the one in which he says that the mom collapsed and they're moving her to Caldwell to seek medical treatment from Havers.
Oh the bowtie wearing doc is still around, absolutely. Still doing what he does best, which is saving lives.
Meanwhile, before all this goes down Tess and Trez need to do their little dance, first.
Trez is told by iAm to let it drop - Tess is her own person, not Selena, and he won't bring Selena back by mooning over her look-alike. This of course leads to an argument between the two brothers, and I'm really unhappy with how iAm was treated in this book, because we learn that, not only is HE happily bonded to the Queen of his people, but they're expecting a child together. And instead of trying to be happy for his brother or at least attempting to deal with the situation in a different way, he's snarling at Trez like a wounded animal, which only makes things worse because he has EVERYTHING, and Trez is on the outside looking in.
No wonder the male wants to off himself.
Rhev pays him a visit, which is exciting to me because it's been a while since we've seen him do much, and he explains that he can see what's going on with Trez because of his nature as a Sympath, and that maybe some medication wouldn't exactly be too wrong in this case scenario.
Trez isn't really that on board with it until sometime towards the end of the book, because he's kind of busy; naturally when he's almost made the decision to leave Tess alone, she walks into his nightclub, and a shooting ensues, which leads to him going right down there to grab her.
I hope Xhex knocked a couple of heads together for that, I truly do.
Xhex actually sees the double mental grid Tess has and has her suspicions, but she doesn't really say anything specific to Trez, and besides he's busy getting all sexy in the back room with Tess anyway.
He also dearly wants to get her out of her current apartment and into a house where she'd be safer, but again, her independent streak doesn't really want that, though she DOES go and have dinner with him there (and some more sexy times, because, duh).
We also learn that Tess has had a 'shadow' lover pretty much all her life, coming to her in her dreams - and it turns out she's been dreaming of Trez all this time.
It would have been super neat if things could end on a high note right there, but if you recall there's this mention of her mom being sick, so Trez takes her over to the hospital where she and her family finally have the long-delayed conversation about how they should have handled things, and just when you THINK things are looking up ... the romance part falls apart.
Theresa is furious with Trez for the inexplicable reason of him falling for her because she's a ringer for Selena, and again she runs off from him, a pattern she has when she has to face difficult situations.
Trez is okay with it. He's realized she's not Selena, too, and wants to go on those meds so that he can stick around, meet his niece and that sort of thing.
Only before that can happen, a fire breaks out at Theresa's apartment building, with her in it, and Trez gets a little mental wake-up at that, hustling over to get her out. During the process, Selena herself appears to both of them, and the pair finally come to the conclusion that, yes, Tess actually IS Selena reincarnated.
Great.
Now how do we get her out of that burning inferno?
Trez calls for backup, and Jane and V arrive for a medical assist even though they unfortunately have to leave Trez behind in the building because they don't have enough hands on them to carry him out, too. But not to worry - in my favourite scene of the entire book, who else but Tohr makes his appearance through the flames to carry Trez out?
Descriptions and scenes with Tohr will never cease to make my heart beat faster, because he has to be my all-time favourite brother. Honest.
Anyway, Trez feeds Tess to help her heal, and since her mom has also woken up again from her coma there looks to be a happy ending on the horizon - especially since, at New Year's, when most of our group is at Tess and Trez's new home celebrating (Wrath, for some reason, stayed behind in the mansion, although most of his fighters are absent, but security, I guess), Lassiter pops in and explains HE's responsible for this reincarnation. He'd taken Selena's soul and bent time to plonk her down as Tess with her current family. But as this is forbidden knowledge, he erases the conversation from the mind of everyone there, because Lassiter.
With the happily ever after achieved, we then take a look at what's to come in the Brotherhood world, aka there's a pissed of V who has to deal with the same human journalist over and over again as she keeps on discovering things she shouldn't, and Butch is pretty sure that there's something off about her. Also that the war might finally be drawing to a close.
But is it? With Devina from the Fallen Angels now loose in the world, I think the next big war is only just beginning, and I don't know if the Brotherhood is equipped to deal with it.
That aside, however, this is where we leave our Brothers and especially Trez with his happy ending. The new book is slated to release sometime in early 2020 so we should see it pretty soon.
And as for Where Winter Finds You?
In general, I was okay with the storyline, although the resurrection begs the question everyone is asking: why couldn't Wellsie be resurrected for Tohr? Everyone else keeps being brought back. Why not her? And when will Xhex figure out John Matthew is actually Darius? She knows about the double grids now from Selena's, so it should be an easy extrapolation. Why leave the King behind when all his fighting force and protection was absent? Why was iAm treated so poorly in this one when he was always so wonderful otherwise?
And most importantly: was there a ghost writer?
It felt like it on occasion. Generally speaking, when you read Ward's earlier books, you see that there's a lot of abbreviations, cussing, shortened speeches, that sort of thing. But in this one, a lot of it was proper grammar and punctuation, the formality of what I'd usually only associated with the Old Language, and nothing whatsoever of the usual tone the books previously carried. I'm not sure what happened, but I wouldn't mind a return to how things used to be.
All in all, this was a solid entry in the series, though to be honest even I'm getting tired of not seeing Wellsie around again. She and Tohr were the OTP and she's the only one who really got axed. I'm starting to wonder why that is, honestly.
So, solid as a read, but confusing at time because of the writing style, not to mention some characters just don't seem like themselves. However, I suppose it's enjoyable enough during the winter season, though I would have loved some more callbacks to The Shadows and maybe some return to old places from there.
Ah well. You can't have it all, right?
xx
*image not mine
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